16 May 202613:45725 views on YouTubeWatch on YouTube
Try to find out how many people eFoil and you will come up empty. It sounds like a question with an answer somewhere, a market report or a manufacturer’s slide, and it does not appear to have one. That gap is the reason this episode exists, and it sits alongside a first cold ride of the season, two winter trips to Puerto Rico and a sponsorship that started with the rider approaching the drinks company rather than the other way round.
The number nobody has
The working guess offered here is that the global rider count may not be much above ten thousand people, and it is explicitly a guess rather than a finding. What makes it interesting is where the guess came from. Founders and senior people at the board companies have been asked directly, and the answer that comes back is either that they do not know or that they will not say. There is no public figure. Which means nobody can currently say whether eFoiling is growing or shrinking, and every claim you read about the sport’s size is somebody’s estimate resting on nothing.
A ride log, and the privacy problem behind it
The proposed fix is to count from the bottom up: riders log their own sessions on verdantride.com, either through a form or, far quicker, by dumping GPX files straight in and letting them populate a map. The part worth explaining is what happens to your location. Ride positions are deliberately jittered by a few kilometres before they appear. That alone turned out not to be enough. Uploading fifty of one’s own rides with a single jitter applied still drew a clear picture of exactly where those rides happened, because repetition defeats randomness. So the algorithm now jitters again when a ride lands near another ride, which spreads a rider’s history around rather than clustering it. If you have been holding back because you did not want a favourite spot appearing on a public map, that is the specific problem being solved.
What the data could actually answer
Head counting is only the first use. The questions the log is built to eventually answer are the ones riders argue about with no evidence at all: which wings genuinely make a difference, which boards deliver the most time on the water per battery, which batteries hold up, and whether newer generations are actually better. Height, weight and age can be added optionally so those comparisons mean something. The map colours each ride by brand, with Lift, Fliteboard, SiFly and Waydoo covered and an “other” category ready to be promoted if enough rides come in on something else. None of this works without volume, which is why the ask is direct: log your rides.
Free music and a speedometer overlay
Two other tools get walked through, both aimed at people filming their own riding. Verdant Speed takes a GPX file and puts a speedometer over your footage. The larger one is the music library: close to a hundred tracks, composed, co-written or paid for by Stephan’s own company, given away free and browsable by album and by mood. Each download arrives as a zip with a licence in it, so a copyright claim on your channel can be refuted and your video stays monetisable. The reasoning is practical rather than charitable. Licensed needle drop music is expensive, library music is lifeless, and using real bands quietly costs you the ability to earn anything from the video. Whatever you can eke out of a small eFoil channel should be yours to keep.
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